‘The Devils’: Nuns, nudity & blasphemy still shock

The Devils returns to U.S. theaters this year in its long-suppressed director’s cut, and audiences are still flinching. Ken Russell’s 1971 film about seventeenth-century hysteria, political power, and graphic sexual blasphemy is playing the same notes it always has, only now without the cuts that once softened its edges. Its restoration and NC-17 rating make the old arguments current again.

Restored cut hits screens

The 4K version now running is the first public release of Russell’s intended cut. Warner Bros. Clockwork pulled the missing footage from the original negative, restoring the full “Rape of Christ” sequence and the femur scene that distributors once refused to touch. The NC-17 certificate is the first formal acknowledgment that the film will be seen as Russell shot it.

Box-office numbers for the limited run reached roughly $1.7 million in the opening weekend across 350 screens. Those figures matter less for profit than for proof that a fifty-five-year-old film can still draw ticket buyers when the version on screen matches the version the director fought for.

Guillermo del Toro called the decades of suppression a true act of censorship. That judgment now sits beside ticket stubs rather than archival footnotes.

Political intent behind the images

Russell described The Devils as his one political film. He framed the Loudun story as an example of state and church working together to crush independence, using sexual panic as the tool. The nudity and blasphemy were never incidental; they were the method.

The director was a practicing Catholic when he made the picture and claimed he had Jesuit support for its argument. That detail undercuts the simple reading of the film as mere provocation and places it inside a specific critique of institutional power.

Those politics remain legible on screen. The restored footage makes the point sharper because the sequences that were cut were the ones that most directly dramatized the debasement Russell wanted audiences to witness.

Original cuts and what stayed out

The British X-rated version ran 111 minutes; the U.S. release trimmed three more. Pubic hair was one target; the two major excised sequences were the full “Rape of Christ” and Sister Jeanne’s scene with Grandier’s charred femur. Those cuts shaped the reputation long before most viewers could see the missing material.

Russell wrote to BBFC head John Trevelyan that Christ had to be debased on screen and that the sequence was the crux of the movie. Warner executives reportedly called the footage the filthiest thing they had ever seen. The gap between those two statements defined the film’s release history.

The restored print closes that gap for the first time. Viewers can now measure the original objections against the actual footage rather than against rumor.

Production design and performance

Derek Jarman’s stark sets and Peter Maxwell Davies’s score gave the film its theatrical severity. The look was never meant to read as historical realism; it was a deliberate frame for hysteria and power. That choice keeps the imagery legible even when the content disturbs.

Oliver Reed’s Grandier and Vanessa Redgrave’s Mother Superior anchor the performances. Redgrave’s sexually obsessed hunchback supplies the personal motive that political actors later exploit. Reed’s priest is charismatic enough that his destruction registers as a public execution rather than a private fall.

The combination of stylized design and committed acting keeps the film from collapsing into simple exploitation. The nudity is explicit, but it is also functional within the argument Russell set out to make.

Contemporary reception and bans

Local UK councils banned the film, the Vatican condemned it, and campaigner Mary Whitehouse organized protests. Those reactions were immediate and organized. They established the pattern of outrage that later distributors inherited when they trimmed the picture for release.

Russell defended the content by pointing to the historical record. He argued that the bare facts of the Loudun case were more horrible than anything dramatized on screen. That defense did not quiet the protests, but it clarified his intent.

The restored version now tests whether those earlier objections still hold when the film is shown complete. Early responses suggest the shock value remains intact even for audiences who know the reputation in advance.

Adaptation sources and real events

The screenplay drew from Aldous Huxley’s nonfiction account and John Whiting’s play. Both works treated the 1634 Loudun case as documented history rather than invention. Russell kept that grounding while amplifying the visual argument.

The real events involved a politically inconvenient priest, a convent gripped by collective possession, and authorities willing to use witchcraft charges to remove an obstacle. The film compresses and heightens those elements, but it does not invent the basic power struggle.

That historical anchor matters because it undercuts the claim that the film simply invented blasphemy for effect. The blasphemy is staged, yet the institutional machinery that produces it follows the documented pattern.

Market response to the re-release

The NC-17 rating limited mainstream exhibition but also clarified the product. Audiences who bought tickets knew what they were buying. The modest opening weekend gross reflected that clarity rather than broad indifference.

Specialty cinemas and repertory houses drove the numbers. Those venues already program difficult or historically significant titles, so the restored Devils fit an existing circuit rather than creating a new one.

Warner’s decision to release the film under the Clockwork label signaled a willingness to treat the uncut version as an archival asset rather than a liability. That choice aligns with other recent restorations of previously suppressed titles.

Why the imagery still registers

The nudity and blasphemy sequences are not isolated shocks. They are the mechanism through which the film shows power converting sexual panic into public violence. Removing them altered the argument; restoring them returns it.

Viewers who encounter the film for the first time in 2026 meet the same images that provoked earlier bans. The difference is that those images now arrive with context rather than rumor. The effect is still strong because the mechanism has not changed.

The film’s endurance as a flashpoint suggests that the combination of institutional critique and explicit imagery remains difficult to neutralize. Each new release tests whether audiences accept that difficulty or repeat the earlier refusals.

Forward path for the title

The restored Devils now exists as a fixed reference point rather than a contested rumor. Future discussions of censorship, religious imagery, and political exploitation can cite the complete version instead of the truncated one. That shift does not settle old arguments, but it changes the terms on which they continue.